


the higher you go (the further you fall)

by soulsinsolarem



Series: Change the Way the Story's Told [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Moral Ambiguity, Self-Insert, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-01-10 00:58:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12287880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soulsinsolarem/pseuds/soulsinsolarem
Summary: "Everything is fine," I say, as it becomes increasingly evident that nothing will be fine ever again. Or, at the very least, the same.(Calculus is the mathematical study of change. Which is all very well and good, but what happens when the variables of the world themselves change? What happens when the variables you know are gone?)((What happens when you are reborn into a fictional world?))





	1. The Becoming

_No one is certain of the causes of reincarnation but reincarnation does happen. Those reincarnated never receive memories of their past lives and their only identification is a 95% similarity in chakra signatures. There has never been a case where the reincarnation remembers._

__\- Found on page seven of An Overview of Reincarnations by Itō Fuyumi_ _

**Konohagakure no Sato**

**09:48 Tuesday, June 18, 076**

**Two years since the Kyuubi attack**

When I woke that summer morning, I didn't think anything of the soft gray light streaming through the window or of the light green covers tucked around my body. I just groaned at the fact that it was morning and buried my face in my pillow for some regretful minutes. Then, I sighed, sat up quickly, and swung my feet over the bed for an unexpected confirmation of a fact that I already knew.

Bare feet and a cold floor do not go well together. I looked around the room wildly, a sharp gasp torn from my throat as I hurriedly tucked my feet back under the covers. This wasn’t my room. My eyes skimmed over the bare yellow walls and wooden doors and I could feel my chest getting tighter even as I wracked my memory for what I was doing last night.

Coming up blank, I scrambled off the bed quickly, ignoring the shock of cold air against my skin and turned in a rapid circle. Had I been kidnapped?

"Where am I?" I whispered aloud and instantly regretted it as a wave of pain crashed down behind my eyes and I fell sideways, curling up on the floor and squeezing my eyes shut, pressing them hard with my hands.

I don't know much time passed before I regained awareness but the soft light that I had awoken too had become harsh and bright when I finally opened my eyes. I flinched away, my head throbbing sharply in protest, and grabbed the covers off the bed to bury my face in.

"Okay," I said finally, after a miserable moment of just breathing. "Okay," I repeated, the word slightly slurred and tripping off my tongue awkwardly. I pushed my face deeper into the blanket before raising my head, taking a single deep breath, and shoving my face back in. "I'm somewhere strange and I have weird memories in my head..."

I rolled over the floor, abandoning the blanket completely, and choosing instead to throw an arm over my face, welcoming the cool press of flesh over my eyes.

"My name is Elizabeth Hunt. I'm eighteen years old, about to start college, American, and the last I remember is being in a car accident," I said slowly, feeling my way through the words.

"Except for the parts where that obviously isn't true," I continued, gritting my teeth and raising my arm up in the air. For a moment, I just stared, taking in the soft olive skin and pudgy digits wiggling at my command, so different from my Irish-pale skin and long slender fingers.

"And I'm tiny..." I said helplessly, unable to stop the tears from building in my eyes, voice rising into a whine. "So very, very tiny, dear God, what's happened to me? How old am I?"

I gritted my teeth and sat up, scooting across the floor so I now sat with my back to the wall. “Okay, remove emotion," I lectured myself, hearing my dad speak the words alongside me, "and think about this logically."

"Create a list of questions, come on. Am I dead? Did that car crash kill me?" I paused, taking in the overwhelming horror of that question for a moment before I continued, the slightest hitch in my breath but no tears. "If I am not dead, am I in a coma? Is this just a product of my mind? If I am not in a coma, then have I been reborn? Is reincarnation..." I stopped.

"But I'm Christian," I said, voice rising in slight hysteria and shutting my eyes against the pinprick of tears. "I'm supposed to be either in heaven or hell! I shouldn't be-"

"...I shouldn't be... ugh, I might not even be dead. I could be in a coma." I perked up at that, eyes widening, as my heartbeat begins to slow down. "Yes, that has to be it. I'm in a coma. I'm in a coma and I made up a new life for myself..."

I spent a moment feeling sorry for myself before deciding that I better figure this out and how to wake up before I spent too long trapped here. "The facts of this dream," I said as briskly as I could, looking around the room for a pad of paper before abandoning as a lost cause for the moment, too lazy to get up.

I rubbed my nose in frustration and began with what I could remember, the memories easy to recall like this life was something I had always known. "My name is Mira Ayame. I'm two years old, the daughter of two loving parents, unknown nationality, and the last thing I remember..." I trailed off, before my eyes widened. "Oh, crap."

The door creaked against the floor as a woman entered, eyes bright and smile warm, chattering away a mile a minute as I stared in mute horror. I can't speak the language. I can't understand, I don't - why would I do this to myself?

The woman reached down and scooped her up, tone turning curious and slightly worried and I panicked, trying desperately to remember what age kids usually learned to speak at. What age, what language - who are you even? Are you my mother?

The woman carried me downstairs and strapped me into one of the child harnesses that I had sometimes seen advertised Before the Accident but had never seen in actual use. I suffered through the quiet humiliation without a word and hoped that my imagination had not been so cruel as to make it so that my dream-self was a chatty and energetic child.

The woman straightened, - and she has to be my mother just from the way she acts, I decided, even if it's not by blood - an inquisitive babble falling from her lips even as she clipped the attachment to her own waist.

I followed my dream-mother obediently, watching carefully to ensure that I was acting as expected. Someone shouted from behind us when we were halfway down the street and I turned, reluctantly tearing my gaze away from the houses around them. They were just so different from the standard American cookie-cutter house with their peaked roofs and wooden walls and I loved them at first sight.

"Sayomi," the man repeated before the word was lost in a rush of strange words. Sayomi, I thought, turning the word over carefully. Is that my mother's name? I listened intently and I think I caught my own name thrown in there but he was going too fast for me to be certain.

Either way, Sayomi nodded and injected a few sentences from time to time but mostly she seemed content to let the man talk and I couldn't blame her. A full conversation with the man seemed certain to be exhausting and I edged behind Sayomi when he spat out a whole paragraph and continued without even stopping for breath.

I was fully invested in my tiny little shoes and examining how small and delicate my toes looked, peeking out in my sandals, when he said something that made Sayomi brighten and become much more invested in the conversation. The man actually looked vaguely overwhelmed as she fired question after question at him in rapid succession and I fought off a giggle.

They began walking as they spoke and after some more back and forth, Sayomi stopped and looked down at me, saying a few short but happy words.

I nodded cheerfully and grinned and hoped that my complete incomprehension didn't show in my eyes as Sayomi scooped me up in her arms and began to run. My laughter tore out of my in a short sudden burst of giggles at the flabbergasted look on the man's face when Sayomi left him behind and raced down the street.

We slowed down near a huge, massive gate that easily towered over everyone there and I started thinking rapidly as Sayomi set me down. A lot of this looked vaguely familiar and I couldn't help but wonder if I had come up with all of this with pure imagination or if I had ripped off some fictional universe.

She began chatting cheerfully with two men standing next to the gate and I fidgeted uncomfortably as a few minutes went by before observing the men carefully, trying to figure out their relationship to Sayomi and, by extension, myself and why they were worth running halfway across town for.

Half an hour later, the two men were gone and Sayomi and I were still by the gate. I sat sullenly down on the ground, tore grass up with my tiny little fists, and stared back into the city for lack of anything better to do. When my butt got sore, I shifted to laying on my stomach, feeling the prickles of the grass through my shirt but unwilling to move, and stared at Sayomi unhappily. I didn't care if I wasn’t being energetic or annoying enough as I baked in the hot sun but I needed to know how this body usually acted. Sayomi ignored me though, choosing instead to stare fixedly out into the distance.

Another few minutes passed. I rested my head on my folded arms, and tried to remember what had happened last night during the car crash. We had been driving back from... from where…

Sayomi let out an excited gasp and I lifted my head frowning. There was dust on the horizon and I sat up properly as Sayomi lunged to her feet. A group of covered wagons slowly came into view and Sayomi whooped. I frowned at the covered wagons feeling almost cheated. They looked exactly like the ones on the Oregon Trail but they didn't fit with the Japanese-style houses in the city behind me and I felt the dissonance in my bones.

Though to be fair, if I was in a coma, I was dreaming all of this up and dreams are wacky, wild things. Maybe I would see more historical mismatches as the dream continued and maybe I would even see some fantasy creatures. A unicorn would be nice. Or even a dragon.

When the group got close enough, Sayomi grabbed me again and ran out of the gates, smiling fit to burst. I was beginning to get really tired of being grabbed like that but I bore it calmly as a man strode forward, arms out.

Sayomi barreled into him full speed, somehow managing to protect me from getting squished. I looked, saw the two of them beginning to kiss long and sweet, and promptly shut my eyes. They may be my parents but I had no interest in watching two virtual strangers kiss.

He laughed when they separated, bending down to kiss me on my cheek as well, and I giggled at him because it seemed like the thing to do. Internally, I was wailing at myself for sticking me in the body of a baby. Should I have giggled?

He didn't seem to find anything wrong with it as they turned to head into the gate. I looked up as high as I could in a desperate attempt to stop analyzing the situation and saw some sort of design painted on the top. I squinted, unhappy with these terrible eyes, and could vaguely make out a strange curling symbol that looked distinctly familiar.

Wasn’t that... wasn’t that the symbol of the Leaf in Naruto? How I remembered that I had no idea considering the last time I had read the manga was in eighth grade and I had never even touched the anime.

It was looking more and more likely that my subconscious was just pulling anything I had ever seen into this dream world and using it willy-nilly. It certainly explained the Japanese theme of the city... or rather village, huh. Then I looked past the gate and saw the Hokage monument and well.

Well. That was certainly... something else.

I continued watching it all the way home, twisting in my mother's arms to keep it in view. Half of my mind really was in awe at the magnificence and the sheer scale of the faces but the other was busy wondering why the heck I had picked Naruto. What about other fictional universes like Tortall or Middle Earth?

It's still early in the dream, I reasoned eventually. Maybe the actual characters would come into the dream but it does look like my mind had picked this universe randomly. In fact, it would probably be better to just have one universe and not a weird mishmash of them anyway.

I could live with that. It sucked that my desire to always remain true to the text would come into play here in my own coma but beggars can't be choosers. Besides this universe isn’t half bad from what I remembered. Didn't they have something like magic here?

Then I got home and nearly chopped off my own finger and I began to think that this wasn’t a dream after all.


	2. The Realization

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Ayame comes to a few conclusions, meets some new people, and has an ongoing meltdown in the back of her brain at all times.

_ Genjutsu users are feared: not because they are able to weave illusion into reality but because they can turn reality into illusion. A rustle of the air, the crinkle of a twig, a drop into a puddle - Taru, one can lose their mind listening to and seeing things that aren’t there. Our only hope is willful denial and mastery of our surroundings… _

            - Stated by Kawasaki Shoda in his final years, dated 032

**Konohagakure no Sato**

**13:02 Saturday, August 24, 076**

**Two years since the Kyuubi attack**

I am not in a coma. Or rather, I have determined to act as though I am not. The main problem is that I am no neurologist by any means and I don’t know what it like for those inside comas and I never bothered to look it up Before.

…I regret that now. I regret a lot of things now.

The sticking point for me is that this world is so vibrant, alive, and painful. Based on the fact that the mind dreams within the coma and dreams sometimes take information about the outside world and warp it to make sense inside the dream, I thought that pain outside the coma might work that way here. I wanted to see, when I hurt myself, if that pain acted oddly at all - if the wound would simply stay open inside the dream and refuse to heal or if the pain would linger beyond a normal time. If I was inside a coma, it didn’t seem terribly far-fetched that my brain would warp it to make it seem like it was my idea to test the theory when it was actually something happening to my body.

And so, it was my decision to cut my finger though admittedly I didn’t mean to make it so deep. It was also my decision to drop the kunai and slice a shallow gash alongside my leg.

It was not my decision to be rushed to the hospital to be healed by a medic-nin. The pain vanished, leaving only a quiet ghost behind, when those glowing green hands settled over the wound. That in itself was suspect. Such a harsh stabbing pain and then such a quick disappearance… I honestly didn’t know of anything that could make it so that pain stopped so incredibly quickly. My perception of time could be out of whack but that theory just didn’t seem right to me on a visceral level.

Then there was the level of the pain itself. The level fit a stab wound, or so I assumed, but I couldn’t think of a single hospital instrument that would cause such pain. Surely such a vicious injury would mean something had happened to my body…

Or maybe I was overthinking this with too little information and too much conjecture. For all I knew, pain could be magnified inside comas. Maybe my brain was just trying to fit various happenings outside to what was happening inside the dream.

I just had too little information and that wasn’t going to change. I know myself, I know that I have plenty of imagination, and I know that I am very good at lying to myself. If I was in a coma, then it would make sense that I was subconsciously controlling this dream. If that was so, I could research comas in this world and yet be completely uncertain if what I was researching was true. That would just set off a downward spiral of distrust in the world around me and it doesn’t take a genius to see where that would lead.

That would destroy me. So, in the interests of self-preservation, it was coma or bust. I chose bust simply because you cannot live in a coma and I… even if it’s a lie, I would like to live.

I scowled darkly at the cheery yellow wall illuminated by the sun. I’m not in a coma. Okay, I can work with that. I’ve died and been reborn into a completely different world with a new culture, language, parents, history… that I’m not too sure about.

“Ayame!” my mother squealed, swooping in out of nowhere to snatch me up. She tickled my stomach, “Blah blah food blah blah,” and I gave her an involuntary grin. My stomach chose that exact time to rumble as she carried me to the high chair.

“Ooh,” she laughed and spoke some more. I had no idea what she said but I caught my name and father’s in there so I grinned again and tried to hide my worry. The language barrier was just an inconvenience at first but, now that I had realized this wasn’t a dream, it had blown straight past annoyance and was well into the first stirrings of absolute terror.

I was basically being held hostage by my inability to read, speak, or write, and it was making me paranoid beyond belief. I felt uncomfortable just working on the computer with my back to an open room for fear of silent judgement and vulnerability and this lack of understanding was so far beyond that it wasn’t even funny.

I was going to have to learn this language and fast in order to be able to start planning out the rest of my life. I knew that I needed to figure out where I was before anything else and then when I was and then…

Well, I’d figure that out when the time came. I finished eating and looked Sayomi expectantly. She was watching me with a strange look on her face and I felt my quiet smile falter. She looked almost… suspicious.

_ Okay _ , I thought desperately as my heart jackknifed in my chest and I went still.  _ Calm down. Even if she thinks something is off about you, her mind’s not going to jump to reincarnation. Calm down. No one’s throwing you into the loony bin. _

Sayomi’s expression had cleared as I was calming myself down from a minor heart attack and she was smiling at me as genuinely as she always had as she lifted me from the chair. I toddled my way over to the low table in the center of the room and waited for her to finish gathering her things.

_ Idiot _ , I berated myself bitterly and swore I could still feel my heart going quicker than before.  _ You can’t be so careless. Yeah, people are going to see there’s something off - of course something’s off! A teen in a toddler’s body… but you have to control yourself! Keep reacting and you’re going to react yourself into an early grave. _

As Sayomi made her way over to the door, I walked after her, extraordinarily grateful that I had already started walking before I landed in this body. Granted, I couldn’t walk very well half the time but I could walk.

“You ready?” Sayomi asked as she always did before we took a walk. I nodded happily and hopped out the door. No matter what I was feeling, taking a walk outside always cheered me up. Around ten minutes later, we were at the market which was set up rather like a farmers market in my previous life, huge and open. It was run by either civilians or retired ninja and located close to both the civilian and ninja academies which were snug against the Hokage Monument. As far as I could gather, this was due to protection with the ninja clans creating a rough parameter around Konoha and the majority of the ninja activity taking place nearer to the gates.

By this time, I was feeling less refreshed and more hot with the sun beaming straight down. I took refuge in the shade watching Sayomi inspect some cherries. I glanced around taking in the bustling crowd and began one of my favorite and most useful pastimes. Figuring out what the hell they were saying.

From the looks of it, one woman two stalls over was trying to haggle with the seller. They were getting quite animated and I settled down to watch the show. He kept shaking his head no, no and oops there went an arm slashing through the air for emphasis. She slammed some money down spreading it out to show what she had and he scowled in her general direction but looked down nonetheless. I glanced back at Sayomi and froze when I saw a man paying the seller and my mother nowhere to be seen. I looked around wildly but I couldn’t see even a glimpse of long silky black hair.

I clambered up my stool so I was standing then lost all patience and hopped up onto a free spot on the booth’s bench. There!

I jumped off the stool, staggered a bit, and set off at a run. “Kaa-san!” I called out and slammed into her leg breathing heavily. “You scared me!” I exclaimed and looked up. It took a moment but… that’s not Sayomi. I squeaked slightly and released the stranger’s leg like poison.

“Uh,” I said, feeling vaguely unnerved right before I fully recognized him and went very still. Orochimaru sneered down at me and looked ready to say something biting before he looked over my head and made one of the most exasperated faces I had ever seen. He looked back at me and asked, “Are you lost? Do you need help?” like it physically pained him.

I had no idea how to respond. I thought I had the sentence correct from what little words I could recognize and his body language and actions but what if I didn’t? And if I did have the right words... Did I need help? Yes, but was I willing to admit it to  _ him _ ? No. Would he be able to tell if I was lying? Probably. How would he react? Would that make me a target? How did he even pick his experiments?

He probably wouldn’t even remember a little girl at the market, I reasoned, and that gave me the courage to say yes. He looked, for a brief moment, like he wanted to tell me to piss off anyway before he sighed and crouched down in front of me.

“Where did you last see your mother?” he asked, sounding less angry and more bored. I swallowed and tried not to give myself the chance to second guess my interpretation, “Stand 19,” I said haltingly and held up my hands to make 10 then made 9 in case I didn’t say the number right. “Cherries,” I tried then, remembering from Sayomi pointing fruit out to me on previous trips.

He nodded and stood again. “Let’s go.” Every single instinct from my past life was blaring abort abort but I could do nothing but nod. He… he wouldn’t try anything in broad daylight, right?

I followed him, weaving through the crowd. He never stopped for me or slowed down so there were times I lost him completely but I was small enough and quietly desperate enough that I could go between people’s legs and slip through the small spaces left open. When we reached Stand 19, he turned and hauled me up through the air and planted me on top of the booth.

I was too startled to even make a sound and he gave me a brisk nod. “Stay,” he said jabbing a finger down onto the booth before turning and walking back into the crowd. I turned to the side just in time to see the booth owner give me a strange, almost scared look and turn away to rearrange perfectly fine melons.

Another man walked up, asked for 2 bunches of cherries, and leaned on the bench next to me. I looked at him, took in the two distinctive red markings, and turned back to the crowd. He may be powerful and important but I had no interest in talking to a pervert like Jiraiya of the Sannin.

He muttered something I didn’t understand but didn’t seem like he wanted to strike up a conversation anytime soon which I was silently grateful for. My butt was starting to get sore and I was shifting uncomfortably by the time Orochimaru came back with Sayomi in tow. I relaxed when I saw her, perking up slightly, before I caught sight of her angry expression and shrunk back in confusion.

She made an effort to look calmer when she saw my apprehension and plucked me off the booth, holding me at her side rather than placing me down. She said something short and curt to Orochimaru, nodded to Jiraiya, and stalked off. I blinked before twisting around and waving before I lost sight of them. It seemed like a normal thing to do and it was also polite.

Hopefully, this would mitigate any interest they might have about me. Any and every stranger I met always seemed happy to meet me but within five minutes something would ping their internal alarms and they would distance themselves from me.

Nothing had happened so far though I had seen my parents talking together in quiet tones but I got the impression that it was because they were civilian. I wasn’t sure how ninja would react and I didn’t want to find out.

When we got back to the house, Sayomi crouched down in the entryway, resting her hands on my shoulders. I looked back at her serious expression and wished very very strongly that I could just instantly understand what she was saying. I caught Orochimaru’s name in there and saw the fear in her eyes and nodded.

“Stay,” I tried, “um…” I paused and pretended to catch sight of something before turning to the side and walking down the hall a few steps. “Orochimaru.”

Sayomi nodded saying, “And Jiraiya.” I blinked at her, wondering what caused that. As far as I could remember Jiraiya was a respected ninja, charismatic and friendly. I nodded anyway and carefully parroted her words.

She relaxed slightly and gave a strained smile before standing and looking a bit helplessly at the grocery bags clumped up against the wall. I wished I could help her out but even if I could haul one of the bags around, I was exhausted. My body was still two after all and even just following Orochimaru through the crowd had pushed it to the limit.

I yawned but followed her to the kitchen nonetheless. I stared up at the stool that I usually sat on, decided not today, and plopped down onto the floor. Damn, this was all stressing me out and I couldn’t even read something or go for another walk. Everything had become horribly real all of a sudden. It was one thing to think that you have been reborn into a world of violence and killers but it’s another to run into freaking Orochimaru buying plums at the market.

Sayomi was talking, voice steadily growing more cheerful, and I felt a hot flush of absolute rage go through me. Suddenly I wanted to break something, wreck something beyond all repair. Why was this happening to me? I didn’t want to be here - I didn’t want to be struggling to understand a different language, a different culture, where no one even looked twice at a tiny toddler wandering alone. What kind of place was this?

Most of all, I didn’t want to be in Orochimaru’s sight again. A chill went down my spine as I remembered his human experiments and the terrifying fact that he had both evaded discovery for so long and had managed to escape.

Suddenly, it was absolutely crucial to me that I know what point in the timeline I was at. I knew the basic events of Naruto, half of it gained through osmosis or something, but I had no idea about the rest of the story. This world made monsters of men and I… I didn’t want to get caught up in that.

It seemed a Catch 22. I could become a ninja and stand a chance of defending myself against other people or I could stay a civilian and… not. But if I became a ninja, I would have to act in service to the village… and for some reason that wasn’t sitting well with me. I knew what the story had said in regards to Itatchi and that wasn’t filling me with a great deal of confidence. To live in a nation where orders could simply be handed out like that to kill a group of dissenters… 

Plus they were ninja. Who knew what orders they might hand out. If they were giving assassination missions would they give seduction missions too? Missions to kill children? I didn’t remember any brutal missions enacted by the main characters but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.

I wondered what it said about me that I thought of corrupted orders first then of the obvious fear of being killed or maimed.

Plus, there was the problem of my ability to even be a ninja in the first place and whether I was willing to even try. I didn’t fancy learning taijutsu and getting hurt again and again and again. Striking a post for hours on end or even plain old exercise weren’t exactly my thing. And there was the constant fear whispering in my ear: what if I did it and I died anyway?

It was that old question meant to pull others out of a slump. Is it better to try and fail or never try at all? 

Personally, I had always felt that it depended more upon the circumstances than your answer to the question.

The helpless rage was still simmering under my skin but I clamped down on it the most I could. This wasn’t the life or death I had wanted but it seemed I was just going to have to deal.


End file.
